Conversations About the End of Time - Hardcover

Eco, Umberto; Gould, Stephen Jay; Delumeau, Jean; Carriere, Jean-Claude

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713993634 ISBN 13: 9780713993639

Publisher: Allen Lane, 1999

Synopsis

Where does our fascination with the Apocalypse come from? Is time cyclical or linear? Can society survive without ideology? Can children be philosophers? Four great witnesses of our closing century examine our preoccupations at the end of this millennium, cast back to the fears and hopes of previous generations and examine the challenges to come. Mixing the humorous with the profound, they tackle a vast range of fundamental questions which have long taxed the minds not only of our greatest thinkers, but most of the rest of us too.

About this title

Review:

This discussion of some millennial themes consists of interviews with the principals followed by a certain amount of mutual comment and some final conclusions. Gould does his standard act about the arbitrariness of the millennium and the importance of the growth of awareness of deep time--a sense of the vast age of the world and the universe is important to that perspective which might help us behave decently to each other. Carriere, a Christian intellectual, discussed the hopeful side of the Book of Revelations and the need for loving kindness. Delumeau talks about the end of the Kali Yuga and the balance of the role of Shiva and Vishnu in Hinduism and worries about the disappearance of tenses and moods in French--arguing that something is seriously lost if we can no longer think in the subjunctive Future Perfect. Eco is the star here, and says wonderfully phrased, paradoxical, but not especially memorable, things about how right all the others are; if anyone wants to know what the brightest and best think about the millennium, this is not a bad place to start--the stress on kindness as an ultimate human value cannot but be attractive. --Roz Kaveney

Synopsis:

How has the Western Christian world responded in the past to repeated claims that the end of the world is nigh? How do different religions understand what is meant by the end of the world? What have science and philosophy got to say about the end of time? Why do people suffer? What is hell? Is time cyclical or linear? These are just a few questions tackled by Umberto Eco, Stephen Jay Gould, Jean Carriere and Jean-Paul Delumeau in a series of thought-provoking conversations. Mixing the religious with the profane and the deeply profound with the humorous, the conversations explore anything and everything from the concept of time as embedded in language to the reasons why war became an industrialised phenomenon in the 20th century.

About this edition

• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0713993634
• ISBN 13: 9780713993639
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240